Hi,
I've been dual booting XP professional and Mandrake 9.2 for a while. My friend's external hard drive failed, so, in order to recover the data onto my hard drive, I had to erase my linux partitions (not enough space)
. To do this, I used Partition Magic 8.0. After recovering the data to my computer and restoring it to its original drive, I restarted my computer. Lo and behold, right after the BIOS finishes the tests and stuff, instead of going to the LiLo screen, I'm greeted with a black screen with an L in the corner followed by columns with the number '99' in them.
A brief overview of my computer. I'm using a Asus P4C800 Deluxe with a Seagate 120GB SATA HD, and a Hitachi 160GB SATA HD.
The hard drive situation is messy - I was originally using the Seagate (let's call it C: drive) until it started having major issues, and the drive eventually went kaput. After many attempts to restore it, I bought the Hitachi (lets call it D: ) and installed windows on it, leaving a sizable partition for a linux distro. In windows, it called D: my primary drive, and C: was just a plain ol' NTFS drive. I was able to view C: and deleted the windows files off it, but there were some folders I was unable to remove. So, i was running C: as a storage drive and D: as my primary disk. I then installed Mandrake on the empty partition (lets call this H: ) and all was good...
Until I formatted the linux (ext3) partition.
I think this a MBR problem. (ie the MBR got formatted over) I want to try booting into the recovery console and doing a 'fixmbr' and 'fixboot', but am unsure as to which I should run first. Also, will this render my hard drives inacessible? And what does each specifically do?
If it matters, I also have Symantec ghost installed.
wow, long post...
thanks